


Shards

by ilien



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Crossover, Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, XM:DOFP completely ignored, abuse of magic and telepaty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2018-04-17 12:46:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4667034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilien/pseuds/ilien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wanda is trying to hurt those responsible for her brother’s death, but the quest to mess with Loki’s head proves to be more satisfying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Wanda’s alone at the new base. There are so many people around – they’re talking to each other, running, yelling and whispering – but she’s alone. She could touch each of their minds one by one or all of them at once, and see their pain, their fears, all of their suffering – but she knows none of it will ever be as bad as what she’s feeling right now. None of it can even compare.

“You know,” someone says behind her, as if answering her thoughts, although there’s no one in the world anymore who would know what she’s thinking. “We’ve all lost someone. You know that, don’t you? Thor lost his mother very recently, and—and his brother, too. Sam lost his best friend, and I—“

She knows how much the Captain lost. She, of all people, is well aware that once, he lost a part of himself, just like she did – watched it happen in slow motion, helpless, just like she did. She also knows that he’s getting him back. It’s just a matter of time. When it happens, she’ll be there, and make sure he gets back the whole man, not just an empty shell. That, she can do.

She doesn’t turn around or say anything.

“I mean… I don’t mean to say any of us lost more than you did. Or that any of us really knows how you feel. I’m sorry if it sounded—that’s not what I meant. I just want you to know, you have someone to talk to.” 

He sighs, devastated. She can feel it on him – his desire to help, his helplessness at the face of her pain. She knows she should thank him, perhaps promise him she’ll talk to someone; she knows her promise can take at least some of the burden off his shoulders, but she doesn’t have it in her yet. She nods, instead. It’s not enough to make him feel like he’s done enough to help her, but it does ease some of his tension. He pats her shoulder, awkwardly, and walks away. 

She peeks in Steve’s mind as he goes. Despite of what he just said, he can’t help comparing her loss to another’s. It’s not surprising, of course; people always compare and simplify. What is surprising, though, is that it’s not his own pain he’s thinking of – although that would be fitting, of course – but Thor’s. She can feel that it’s an effort for him: trying to think of the person Thor lost as nothing more than Thor’s brother whose passing hurt Thor so badly. 

It feels odd in her mind: there’s something wrong about it. Something’s not the way it appears to be. She has a feeling it won’t take her long to get to the bottom of it. That will give her something to think of beyond the revenge she still has planned.


	2. Chapter 2

Loki dreams of death. It’s not the first time that’s ever happened to him, of course, both awake and in his sleep, but it’s never been so… real. And alien, at the same time – like it’s pieces of his own life, but ones long lost and forgotten; like the view of the home he never had, in ruins, through thick fog. 

It starts with a Midgardian woman he once knew. With her eyes, Loki sees the man she loves—the man who married her, gave her son his name and his home; the man who loved her and her son much more than Loki ever loved anyone—taken away. The boy is screaming in the distance, and Loki knows—she knows—that she’ll never see him again. That he’ll be dead in just a few hours. He feels all of her suffering, her fear and loneliness, and it’s overwhelming. It doesn’t, however, last very long.

If he’d known what she’d go through in that short pathetic human war—he would have left her, anyway.

***

Stark doesn’t sleep at all. Sometimes he passes out from exhaustion or inebriation, but that’s not sleep, because he’s never rested after it. Wanda stays in his head long enough to see that there isn’t much she can do that he hasn’t done to himself. It almost puts her off the whole making them pay endeavor. Almost. She still needs closure. Still doesn’t know a life outside revenge, however hard the Captain is struggling to show her. 

She sends Stark a nightmare, anyway. It’s small and insignificant, just some random distressing images and sadness; even as she’s doing it, she knows she’s doing it half-heartedly.

For the first time, she thinks her other task might be more worthy.

***

The next night, Loki sees her death. The Midgardian woman whose name Loki doesn’t remember follows her husband to the grave soon enough, and Loki sees it through the eyes of their son. She falls to the ground as the bullet hits her, and all that’s left is pain and anger. He feels that pain, tastes it, sees it from every possible angle, at different moments of the boy’s life: it’s helplessness and desperation at first, numbness soon after, and the overwhelming desire for revenge for a long time after that. Pain of loss never leaves this boy as he grows up, not in the short half a dozen decades of his agonizing life.

He knew the woman briefly, and the boy not at all. He knew about him, of course he did, but it’s not like there’s any point in caring for human offsprings.

***

Magneto’s wearing the helmet even in his sleep. It makes sense: dreams make people vulnerable. It’s wise, shielding himself from anyone who could explore that vulnerability. It cannot shield him from her, though. She’s not just a telepath. 

She waves her hand, touching his forehead with her powers. He opens his eyes, instantly aware, but immobile. She feels him panic, and then almost relax as he recognizes her. She’s always wondered if he would know who she is.

“Why did you leave us?” She asks. He won’t remember it in the morning, of course, but she needs to hear the answer. 

“I thought you’d be safer without me,” he says, and she knows he’s not lying – not to her, anyway. If anything, it makes her even angrier. 

“Is he much safer with a bullet in his back?” She asks. Pietro didn’t die from just one bullet, but she knows this will hurt more. 

She can see that it does. She knows there was more than one bullet in this man’s life, in more than one back. She knows right now he believes he’s responsible for every single one of them. 

She wants it to hurt. She makes sure he does remember it in the morning, after all.

***

Loki’s next nightmare is a teenager whose father is murdered right in front of him. The father’s own gun turns in his hand and shoots him right between the eyes. The boy is stunned and terrified, and Loki sees his whole life after that day: the pain of loss that barely fades in time, the bitterness that never leaves him, the loneliness that comes from that bitterness and eventually leads him to his early grave. 

Only as he wakes up, he realizes who has the power to do that with a gun.

***

The green monster is just as miserable as Stark, and just as lost. It’s not the green monster Wanda wants, however—if she’s completely honest with herself, she kind of likes the guy now—it’s the other one. Banner. Stark’s accomplice in creating the thing that killed her brother. 

Banner’s nowhere to be found, though. He’s hiding so deep inside his other self that even Wanda cannot drag him out. 

She doesn’t send a nightmare to the green monster; she’ll have to wait for Banner to resurface.

***

Some nights, the scenes in Loki’s dreams have nothing to do with the boy he never raised. They’re just people – parents, children, siblings, lovers. There’s a woman whose husband just died, and she knows that means her son is going to starve, because there’s no way she can feed the two of them on her own. There’s a hero who watches his best friend fall to his death and cannot spare a minute to grieve before he has to turn around and keep fighting. There’s another woman who hears a dear voice on the radio, and then all she can hear is static. There’s a man who’s standing beside that woman and feels exactly the same way she does, and then there’s a boy who’s just been told that he’s lost his entire family in one car crash, but only cries for one person who was not his blood. 

There’s a boy who watches his parents die, but only thinks of his sister, alive and terrified beside him. There’s his sister years later; she can sense his death as if it’s her own body that’s pierced with bullets – but the real pain comes later.

Oh.


	3. Chapter 3

One night, she hears a voice in her head. It’s not Pietro’s, so it’s not welcome. No one is welcome in her head anymore. 

“Revenge won’t make you feel better,” the voice says. It’s warm, and welcoming, and kind. It’s not welcome in her head.

“Why do you care?” She asks, and only then, “Who are you?”

“My name is Charles Xavier. I can help you.”

She knows the name; she knows all there is to know about Magneto; of course she knows the name. She doesn’t need his help. She tells him that much.

He doesn’t seem to expect any other answer.

“You’re hurting people, Wanda.”

“They’re not very good people.”

“It doesn’t matter what kind of people they are. What matters is what you do.” He obviously doesn’t understand her intentions at all. “What doing it makes you, that’s what is important.” She knows that—oh God, does she know that. She doesn’t need another reminder. 

Or maybe she does. 

“It never ends, does it? His father wasn’t there for him when he was hurting, he wasn’t there for my brother when he died from a fistful of metal, and I—one day I won’t be there, either, will I?”

“You all are capable of much worse than just not being there,” he says, and she suspects he rarely says something this harsh. She’s a little grateful for the honesty. “But you can ‘be there’, too. It’s your choice, just like it was theirs. You’re always free to make it.” She laughs at that, and it sounds too loud in her empty room. 

“You know where to find me, Wanda.” She does. Who doesn’t? “You’re always welcome in my home.”

With that, he’s gone from her head. Wanda knows she won’t take him up on it. She can guess the Professor knows that, too.

***

Now that Loki knows who’s sending him those dreams, frankly, he’s a little proud. Of course he never cared for that part of his bloodline, but didn’t they turn out marvelous? His son’s pride and anger, his granddaughter’s skill and determination, his grandson’s wit and courage! Not that Loki approves of mindless courage, but the boy did pay dearly for that one.

He’s proud and he’s tired; he wishes she’d stop. He’s not getting nearly enough sleep with her tricks, and occasionally he begins to feel his disguise might be slipping off. A royal guard gave him a suspicious look the other day; Loki had to get rid of him.

He could make her stop forever, but somehow can’t bring himself to do it. If she gets hurt, some small part of him, the one he didn’t know existed before she started sending him those dreams, will strive to make him into one of those pathetic suffering people he’s been dreaming about. It’s new for him – wishing to find another way of stopping someone, one that doesn’t involve killing her.

There is a way, of course.

***

You cannot send nightmares to an AI. She knows JARVIS is now fully back, of course – Stark wasn’t neglecting sleep just to get drunk. She knows Vision sees all Stark’s creations as his family (he’s yet to meet a person, artificial or otherwise, Vision doesn’t consider his family), and she’d be happy for him to have JARVIS back, she really would be, but the AI is yet another accomplice of Stark’s. And she cannot send nightmares to him.

She knows Vision is aware of her intentions. She knows Vision doesn’t believe JARVIS is guilty in any way, and she suspects he’s right. Vision never says anything, never offers friendly advice or a shoulder to cry on. He just gives her short sympathetic looks and stays away. That’s the best support anyone has ever offered her.

***

One night, it’s Thor. Not Thor’s death (Loki is grateful for that; he thinks learning of Thor’s death won’t please him as much now as it once would have a few—lifetimes—ago), but Thor helplessly watching his brother fall. Thor talking to Heimdall every day, not just to check on his human lover, but also hoping, despite himself, that one day he’ll hear that his brother did not, in fact, die in the fall. Thor holding his dying brother in his arms, eager to forgive anything, everything, just for an off-chance it’s another trick and Loki isn’t really dead. Thor leaving Asgard not just because he likes Midgard too much, but also because he knows there’s nothing – no one – left for him in Asgard to keep him there. Thor seeing his brother’s death again and again in his nightmares, only to wake up and remember it wasn’t just a dream.

There’s no doubt that the feelings he’s being fed every night are real: he can tell real emotions from manufactured ones. It’s more painful than he expected it to be – learning how Thor really feels. It doesn’t hurt enough for him to feel any guilt over his deception, but still, hurts much more than he would expect.

***

She’s running out of people to torture. That’s what she’s telling herself, because of course she’s aware that if JARVIS is a guilty party, then half of the world can, in fact, be found guilty this way or another. 

She pays another visit to Stark and finds him passed out in the floor of his workshop, in a pool of machine oil. She unnecessarily checks his vitals, gets him on the couch, and them surprises himself by sending him a pleasant dream. JARVIS does not comment.

***

One evening she comes to her room after a training session (of course there are training sessions, she’s not sure Steve is even aware of her nocturne activities), and there’s Loki. She expected him to show up earlier, or not at all. 

The Midgardian clothing he’s supposedly wearing, a pair of jeans and a cardigan, are very obviously a disguise. She can almost see his helmet; even more ridiculous than Magneto’s and even more useless. She’s aware that Loki doesn’t need a helmet to shield his mind from her – when he’s awake, at least. Right now he’s choosing not to, and that’s peculiar. 

“You don’t look old enough to be my grandfather,” she says, skipping the greetings.

“And you don’t look old enough to be… everything you are. And yet, child.”

They both know she’s no more a child than he is. 

“Is there something you wanted to tell me, or are you here,” she’s voicing the words that aren’t born in her mind, but doesn’t notice it at first, “to invite us for family dinner?” 

It’s the “us” that startles her. She doesn’t dare to look away from Loki’s face. It could be a dream. It could be an illusion, he’s good at illusions, much better than she is; this could be his own revenge for all the nightmares she gave him.

But there are words in her mind that aren’t her own, and her laughably young grandfather doesn’t look vengeful at all. 

“I always knew you’d leave me for another relative when you get the chance,” Pietro says. “I could use the dinner, though. Or five.” He’s sitting right there on her narrow bed. He looks every bit as beautiful as he did the last time she saw him.

“It’s not food you need right now,” Loki says, but they’re not listening. 

Pietro’s there, in her room, in her mind, in her life. This cannot be an illusion; no one’s powerful enough to create an illusion as full as this. She knows Pietro, every freckle on his face (there aren’t any freckles right now, but there will be once he gets a little sun), every thought in his mind. Every corner of his soul. They don’t need physical contact to be together, but they rush into each other’s arms and stay there, just stay there until they don’t know where she ends and he begins. 

He’s missed her, too. Wherever he was – he cannot remember anything – but he knows he missed her; he was just as alone there as she was down here. 

“I hate to interrupt the touching reunion,” Loki says in their heads; they doubt they’d hear him otherwise. “But if you don’t lie down, you’ll faint and scare your sister to death. And we’ll have to do this all over again.” 

Pietro spares Loki an annoyed look but pulls away and sits back on the bed obligingly. He’s mostly himself again, and she’s mostly herself, but she’s still the one to voice his question.

“Why did you do this?”

“Your sister has a talent for persuasion,” Loki tells Pietro, not for a moment fooled with who’s saying the words.

“I need to hear this story,” Pietro states, then yawns and stretches out on the bed.

“She’ll tell you all about it,” Loki promises, although Wanda isn’t sure what she can tell. This wasn’t her plan. She’s just as stunned as her brother. Pietro doesn’t hear her thinking that, though; because by the time she collects her thoughts he’s already napping.

“He’ll sleep for several days,” Loki comments as she sits on the bed next to her brother and takes his hand in hers. “I should have brought him here unconscious, for his sake, but then I would have missed the reunion.”

“Thank you,” she says. 

He nods. She knows he’s not used to being thanked. He knows she’s got questions.

“He wasn’t dead for long, and part of him was still here,” he touched her forehead. “The blood between us helped me find him.”

She doesn’t care for ‘how’, but it seems to be all she’s getting. She’s sure he’s heard the ‘why’ she wants to ask and would have answered if he were inclined to.

“I can’t do this again. Not for him, not for you, not for anyone. I can’t and I won’t. So I’d suggest you two stay away from flying objects from now on.”

She nods. She feels he’s about to leave, so he grabs him by the sleeve if his imaginary cardigan: there’s one more question. He raises an eyebrow at her.

“You brought back my brother,” she says. “Will you bring back his, too?”

They both know who she’s talking about. 

“That was your plan all along, wasn’t it?” He smirks, and it’s not an answer, but he’s gone before she can say anything. He doesn’t ask her to stay away from his dreams. 

She’s considering a family dinner. The old men will have to lose their ridiculous helmets – Pietro won’t let them live it down, otherwise.

She’s not alone in the room.

**Author's Note:**

> The "graphic violence" is really not that graphic, but better safe than sorry, right?
> 
> I'm sorry this work is unbetaed; if you find any mistakes, please, feel free to tell me about them.


End file.
